The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel (42 page)

She tried to shake her head but I held her fast. She said, “You’re trying to confuse me.” We stared at each other for what felt like a long while. Moonlight touched off flecks of copper in her eyes and I saw comprehension glimmering there. She had never considered the possibility of finding happiness in a simple honest life, and she was trying to envision it. I watched possibility quicken in her, flit across her face, and then disappear.

“You’re a dreamer, Luciano. Poor people are not happy. But if you sell that book for me, I’ll love you forever.”

I remembered the chef insisting that nothing could make someone love me. I groaned. “Oh, Francesca.” The flawless creature I adored existed only in my mind, just like the demons I feared in the dark. The pleading girl standing at the window was beautiful, but not brave. The perfect creature of my imagination was no more real than the formulas for gold and immortality.

For the third time in my life, I felt the urge to pray. I looked up, because that’s what people do, and I saw only the empty night sky. Then, I remembered,
Don’t look up; look in
. I thought,
Please—
but this time I closed my eyes and summoned strength from inside myself.

Letting go of her face felt like ripping away a part of myself. I dropped my hands and walked away.

“Luciano …”

I could hear her weeping like a child, and the sound burned where she had touched my face. I walked across the cloister with no thought of being seen. I climbed over the wall and walked north, then south—it didn’t matter. An eerie sense of sleepwalking blocked the full impact, until, in the middle of a stone bridge, reality engulfed me.

I would never see her again.

Grief brought me to my knees. I pressed my forehead to the cold stone and clasped my hands over the back of my head. My sob echoed in the night. I didn’t know it was possible to feel such pain; physical injury would have been a welcome distraction. I must have looked small—a boy huddled in the dark, convulsed with mourning. After the last shudder, I crouched there, hollow and spent. After a while, I rose and wiped my eyes with a listless wrist. I plodded toward the street of fishmongers, wondering who I would be without her.

Dawn had just begun to dilute the inky night sky when I slipped through the window. Domingo still slept, but the chef
was sitting up with his book, awake and haggard. He said, “You went to her.”

“Yes.” I hung my head.

“She rejected you.”

“Not exactly. She wanted me to sell the book. I refused.”

“
Bravo
, Luciano.” The chef stood up and embraced me. He hugged me tight, so tight. “You found your manhood, and it’s formidable, as I suspected. Your pain will pass.”

I wanted to ask when. How long must I feel this way? But the chef sat back in his corner and closed his eyes to give me privacy. I curled against the wall and wept silently until Domingo began to stir. I wiped my face on my sleeve and pretended to come awake.

Domingo looked at me hard. “Luciano? Are you all right?”

I didn’t answer, afraid my voice would give me away. I feigned a yawn, and Domingo said, “I’m going to work. The ship leaves tomorrow at dawn, but I need the money as soon as possible. Ten ducats for each of you, and five more for the captain to let you sneak aboard tonight.”

The chef said, “I’ll get the money. We’ll meet you here later this morning.”

Domingo hoisted himself through the window without another word. He was so anxious to get away from us and from that book that he cracked his head on the window frame and didn’t even stop to touch the scrape. I heard his feet hit the ground, and he ran.

CHAPTER XXXI
T
HE
B
OOK OF
O
PIUM

W
e took a circuitous route to the chef’s rendezvous with his wife. By then, we looked like the worst of the street people—dirty, smelly, beaten, and bone-weary. The chef carried the book under his shirt in much the way many street people carried their meager possessions. He kept his head down and one arm across his middle as if he had an ache in his stomach. I dawdled, keeping a good distance behind him so that we didn’t appear to be together. Although we blended in with the roving poor, we still turned away whenever we saw the
Cappe Nere
or the doge’s guards. We kept to little-used footpaths and half-deserted streets, always stopping to look around corners before venturing forward.

We detoured through a poor section of the city, the Cannaregio, a desolate wharf area where caulkers repaired derelict boats. Balcony railings hung loose over a sluggish canal congested with rotting vegetables and soggy straw from discarded mattresses. Everything spoke of abandonment and wretchedness, and the somber people there, preoccupied with the business of survival, ignored us.

In the twisted Calle del Capitello, we walked between tall, forbidding walls that towered over a constricted alley known as the
street of murderers. Most people went out of their way to avoid that street, burdened as it was by the spirits of outraged victims. Wherever a murder had occurred on that street, a small shrine to the Virgin had been placed in a wall niche. A grimy Virgin smiled down on us every few steps.

We emerged from the Calle del Capitello in front of a tumble-down palazzo swaddled in an air of quiet decay. We walked along the footpath in the shadow of the palazzo, and I looked through the wrought-iron gate. I glimpsed a well-tended garden, pensive and secluded, full of oleanders and roses glowing in morning light. There’s something hopeful about Venetian gardens, oases of life blooming courageously while everything else is slowly licked away and worn down by salt water and time. I took the garden as a sign that somewhere in this dangerous maze of events we might yet find salvation.

At his sister-in-law’s home, a respectable house similar to the chef’s, he told me to wait in the back courtyard while he went inside. He said, “Rosa will be frantic by now.”

I saw them, the chef and Signora Ferrero, and even heard scraps of their conversation through an open window on the main floor. White curtains billowed inward in a sea breeze, and a pitiful scene unfolded in the soft flashes revealed by the panels, which opened and closed like a slowly blinking eye. I allowed myself to watch the sorrowful tableau.

The chef spoke first. I saw apology in his expression and helplessness in his gestures. His face was destroyed. Signora Ferrero’s face, at first frightened and confused, soon darkened with a powerful rage. The chef bowed his head and allowed her harangue to go on without interruption until, abruptly, her anger crumbled. Her fierce look dissolved, and her arms, upraised in mid-tirade, fell around her husband’s neck as she collapsed into his arms. They wept together, and their unconstrained sobs reached me clearly and cut deep.

She stopped weeping first. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief
and caressed his cheek with gentle resignation. They talked, touched each other’s faces, wiped away tears, and then slipped into the comfort of a familiar embrace. They stood like that for a long time.

When finally she drew away from him, they went about preparing for his departure. He slid the book into a flour sack, and I was surprised to see him also pack a quill and a blue ink stone. Then I remembered; his daughters would be in school at that hour to keep up an appearance of normality. No doubt he’d write them letters, perhaps while we waited to board the ship. I wondered whether they could arrange to be reunited in Spain. Perhaps he would write a father’s reassurances.

His wife helped him into a clean shirt and brushed dried mud off his knees. She put a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese into another sack, and she tucked a fat purse into the pocket of his trousers.

They came to the back door together, holding hands like young lovers. The chef looked as though he wished to speak but had no tongue. Signora Ferrero pulled herself up straight. When she spoke, her voice was steady. “We’ve been happy, Amato.”

“Sì, cara mía.”

“But now we must be more than happy.”

He caressed her cheek. “Now we must be brave.”

“Go.” She looked away. “I’ll gather the girls and leave for Aosta today.”

The chef was about to speak when he heard a loud pounding at the front door.

“Maestro.” I tugged his sleeve.
“Cappe Nere.”

He looked crushed and shrunken.
“Cara—”

“Go,” she said, sweeping us away with her hands. “My sister will be slow to answer the door. Go!”

But the chef didn’t move until she closed the door in our faces.

*

At the docks, we rounded the corner at the street of fishmongers and stopped short at the sight of four
Cappe Nere
, milling around outside the home of Domingo’s fishmonger. We backed up along the side of the nearest house and watched as the
Cappe Nere
tried the fishmonger’s front door, peered into his windows, and circled around back to peer into Domingo’s room.

Giuseppe was there, too, holding Bernardo up like a squalling prize. He shook my poor cat by the back of the neck, and Bernardo swiped at the old drunk’s eyes with his claws extended. Giuseppe held Bernardo up to a
Cappa Nera
and whined, “I told you they’d come here, and they did. This is the thief’s cat. He’ll come back for his cat.”

The captain said, “Bruno, stay here and keep an eye out.”

Giuseppe scurried after the captain. “You’re only leaving one man?”

The captain turned on Giuseppe and produced a small knife from his sleeve. He held the point under Giuseppe’s chin and pushed up until Giuseppe’s head strained backward. “You think one
Cappa Nera
can’t handle a cook and a boy?”

“Yes,
signore
. I mean no,
signore
.”

The
Cappa Nera
pushed the point of the knife just hard enough to draw a bead of blood, then withdrew it with a casual wave of dismissal. “If you think one man isn’t enough, stay here yourself. You and the cat will be a big help.” The
Cappe Nere
laughed mirthlessly and then moved off like a single, many-headed animal. Bruno posted himself at the side of the house so he could watch the front and back at the same time, and Giuseppe squatted on the street with Bernardo.

The chef and I communicated with a look, then crept back to the poverty-stricken Cannaregio. We walked down a street that was deserted save for a woman in a third-floor window who was
hanging dingy laundry on a line stretched between buildings. There were no other people about; it was a neighborhood where men left early to do hard labor for other men, and women kept to themselves, busy with household drudgery performed without help and often with a babe at the breast. Only in the evening did those people pull rickety chairs out onto the narrow street to share gossip and homemade wine.

That day, the silence in the street seemed deeper because of the solitary sound of the clothesline creaking at regular intervals as the woman pinned up her clothes and let out the line … pinned up her clothes and let out the line … pinned up her clothes and let out the line.… No faces looked out from any of the run-down houses, no sound reached us but the monotonous, repetitious squeak of the clothesline.

The chef led me to the parish church, and we slipped in through a narrow side door. We walked up the aisle past black-clad widows with bitter faces who mumbled rote prayers for the long-gone husbands who had left them impoverished. The church was antiquated and as dim as a cave, with the smell of mildew and incense permanently embedded in the wooden pews. The place was as poor as its parishioners—the altar cloths were threadbare, the gilding on the saints’ halos was wearing thin, and the Virgin’s mantle had faded to gray. The domed ceiling picked up sounds, expanded them in an acoustical heaven, and sent them crashing down onto the bowed heads below. We heard the amplified click of rosary beads and the rustle of skirts as the widows shifted arthritic knees on the stone floor. They prayed in voices lowered to a deathbed hush.

We sat in silence, and I wondered how long we’d stay there. I wondered how we’d get back to Domingo’s room. I wondered what he’d do if we didn’t get the money to him on time. I wondered why the chef had agreed so easily to Spain. I wondered whether he knew another Guardian there. I wondered what other recipes like
the soufflé he had to teach me. And I wondered, for the hundredth time, what exactly the chef did with opium.

Votive candles sputtered in dark corners and enlivened the features of gloomy martyrs. Narrow shafts of light, furred with dust motes, bisected the shadows. The crucifix over the altar looked blunted by time, and the pale face of Jesus was blurred and burdened by decades of dust. I thought,
Well, if there are more secrets to tell, this is the place to tell them
. I whispered, “Maestro?”

“I’m thinking.”

“There’s something I need to ask you.”

“What?”

“What do you use opium for?”

“
Dio
, now?” He sighed. “It has to do with one of the writings in the book.”

“What writing?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You want to know now?”

“We’re not going anywhere.”

The chef stared at the crucifix for a while and then said, “
Sì
. Maybe this is exactly the right place to tell you about opium.”

Out of nowhere, Bernardo streaked up the aisle and leapt into my lap. “Bernardo!” I stroked his back, and he purred. “You got away from Giuseppe, eh? Good boy. Smart cat.” I kissed his head and laughed. A widow turned and glared at me, but I was so relieved to see Bernardo, I glared back at her.

The chef clucked his tongue. “Are you finished playing with the cat?”

“Sorry, Maestro.”

“Bene.”
He leaned toward me and whispered. “There’s one very simple recipe in the book—water, vinegar, and opium.”

“You don’t use opium in your white-bean soup?”

“Where do you get these ideas?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Well, once in a while, maybe just a pinch if circumstances call
for it. You can’t detect it in food. It’s a painkiller, but it has some powerful side effects. Too much can even kill you.” He shook his head. “It’s not a benign herb to use with abandon. Opium must be handled carefully. We keep opium as a memento of one of our most important writings—an account of the crucifixion, by a Roman soldier who was there. It’s an unusual account that reminds us to be open to alternative explanations of, well … everything. The soldier said he gave Jesus a sponge soaked in vinegar and water, but first he mixed opium into the water.”